Apparently, this is a major victory of the patent system. This, this right here, this is what the patent system has come to. This is the destructive effect it's having on this once beautiful industry. Thanks to trolls like Apple and Microsoft, basic, elemental functionality is being removed from devices people already own.

You have to assume this crap will continue to happen so why keep going back to the source of the problem expecting it to fix it self. The opensource community has better developers anyways that are not just hung up on profit but in most cases are out to make something as good as it can be. The solution if you don't feel like rooting your own firmware and putting the things back in which Google takes out is to flash it with cyanogenmod's firmware located at: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/. If they don't already have rooted firmware for Galaxy Nexus they soon will especially after the latest court case results. They do nightly builds and can almost guarantee that any complaint on the current firmware load of Galaxy Nexus that's been brought up the Cyanogenmod team will fix, including things such as short battery life which I have heard from several people to be a problem.